Facebook: Outage was self-inflicted

SEOUL, South Korea - Don't blame a cyber-attack for the shutdown of Facebook and Instagram overnight.

Facebook says the outage that made the sites inaccessible around the world for about an hour was the result of a technical change it had made. A statement says it was a change affecting "configuration systems."

Users of computers and Facebook's mobile app reported losing access in Asia, the United States, Australia and the U.K. After Facebook was restored, some users in Asia reported that the site was loading slowly or not functioning fully.

Although a group claimed responsibility on Twitter for the outages, a security consultant says a technical fault was more plausible. He points out that an attack on one of Facebook's data centers would have affected just one region.

Facebook has about 1.35 billion active users, and its Instagram site has about 300 million.